Background. Despite the prevalence of sex work and strip clubs across Canadian urban geographies, few studies explore the occupational health and safety outcomes related to indoor male sex work, let alone male stripping whereby men dance for men. Moreover, the sexual service negotiation process in the sex work industry remains to be explored. In knowing that sexual practices with high HIV/STI rates occur in strip clubs (e.g., condomless oral, vaginal, and anal sex), as well as widespread psychoactive substance use among strippers, the purpose of this study was to explore the cultural features of male strippers’ work that impact their health and safety outcomes. Methodology. For this study, we recruited 14 male strippers working with male clients in a Canadian city. Critical ethnography was our espoused methodology. Through field observations, informal conversations, questionnaires, and semi-structured qualitative interviews, we explored the process of sexual transactions between strippers and clients. We used a postmodern angle to interpret our findings through the works of Deleuze, Guattari, and Foucault. Findings. The male strip club is a social matrix produced by the intersection of motivational forces: the motivation to gain money, pleasure, or intimacy, and the motivation to abide by socio-cultural and legal norms. It is upon a matrix of financial necessity and socio-cultural and legal constraints that sex work transactions unfold in the club. Moreover, the club’s health and safety conditions and strippers’ transaction outcomes result from intersecting motivations. Finally, sexual service negotiation is a process of configuring motivational forces between social agents. The motivation for financial gain revealed itself to be the strongest and most consistent force; the focus on capital gain generated asymmetrical connections between strippers, clients, and business entrepreneurs, resulting in specific health and safety outcomes. Conclusion. The Canadian legal and political context surrounding male sex work negatively impacts male strippers’ occupational health and safety conditions by disabling safe connections with clients. Further, the emphasis on money-making activities encourages strippers to value financial gain over their physical and mental integrity. In short, the male strip club work environment is configured in a manner whereby capital gain is prioritized and strippers’ health and safety is undermined.

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Uncontainable Life: A Biophilosophy of Bioart investigates the ways in which thinking through the contemporary hybrid artistico-scientific practices of bioart is a biophilosophical practice, one that contributes to a more nuanced understanding of life than we encounter in mainstream academic discourse. When examined from a Deleuzian feminist perspective and in dialogue with contemporary bioscience, bioartistic projects reveal the inadequacy of asking about life’s essence. They expose the enmeshment between the living and non-living, organic and inorganic, and, ultimately, life and death. Instead of examining the defining criteria of life, bioartistic practices explore and enact life as processual, differential, and always already uncontainable, thus transcending preconceived material and conceptual boundaries. In this way, this doctoral thesis concentrates on the ontology of life as it emerges through the selected bioartworks: “semi-living” sculptures created by The Tissue Culture and Art Project and the performance May the Horse Live in Me (2011) by L’Art Orienté Objet. The hope is that such an ontology can enable future conceptualisations of an ethico-politics that avoids the anthropocentric logic dominant in the humanities and social sciences. / Otyglat liv: Biokonst och biofilosofi undersöker hur biofilosofisk praktik och biokonst, alltså tänkande genom samtida hybrida konstnärliga-vetenskapliga praktiker, kan bidra till en mer nyanserad förståelse av liv än vad vi vanligtvis möter i akademiska diskurser. Med utgångspunkt i ett feministiskt deleuzianskt perspektiv, och i dialog med samtida biovetenskap, pekar biokonstnärliga projekt på det otillräckliga i att ställa frågor om livets innehåll. Projekten tydliggör istället hur det levande och det icke-levande, det organiska och oorganiska, precis som liv och död, är sammanflätade. Istället för att sätta upp fasta kriterier för liv undersöker och framställer biokonstnärliga praktiker liv som en differentiell process, i sig omöjlig att fastställa och därmed något otyglat, som överskrider uppsatta gränser mellan det materiella och föreställda. Följaktligen fokuserar föreliggande avhandling på livets ontologi så som den framträder i ett urval av biokonstnärliga arbeten: ”semi-levande” skulpturer skapade av The Tissue Culture and Art Project, samt performance-konstverket May the Horse Live in Me (2011) av L’Art Orienté Objet. Förhoppningen är att en sådan ontologi kan möjliggöra framtida begreppsliggöranden av en etisk politik som undviker den antropocentriska logik som dominerar humaniora och samhällsvetenskap idag.

The aim of this thesis is to create an ethnolinguistic analysis of two corpuses of Mongolian riddles (Lovor and Ölziikhutag 1990 and Ölziikhutag 2013). The work contains over one hundred riddles appended with translations and morpheme-to-morpheme glosses. The riddles are further analyzed on a phonetic level, including descriptions of specific sound patterns and alliterations, as well as their lexical and semantic properties. This complex analysis, in conjunction with findings gained in field research, renders possible the description of a specific language of Mongolian riddles, characterized by the frequent occurrence of borrowings, the presence of semantically and phonetically 'damaged' words, ideophones, metaphors and many specific cultural expressions. The language of Mongolian riddles also often skilfully exploits overt abstractions, allusions, and lexical and morphological ambiguities, in addition to other techniques which facilitate conceptual mapping and cognitive blending. This linguistic analysis makes possible a description of the various aspects of the worldview of Mongolian nomads concealed in these riddles, including the characteristic linking of the 'sacred and profane,' as well as the relationship of these riddles to mythology and religious ideas.

In the immediate post-independence period, forms of state-sponsored Irish nationalism were pre-occupied with exclusive cultural markers based on the Irish language, mythology and folk traditions. Because of this, a postcolonial examination of how such nationalist forms of identity were fetishised is necessary in order to critique the continuing process of decolonization in Ireland. This dissertation investigates Brian O’Nolan’s engagement with dominant colonial and nationalist literary discourses in his fiction and journalism. Deleuze and Guattari define a ‘minor’ writer’s role as one which deterritorializes major languages in order to negotiate textual spaces which question the assumptions of dominant groups. Considering this concept has been applied to postcolonial studies due to the theorists’ linguistic and political concerns, this dissertation explores the ‘minor’ literary practice of Brian O’Nolan’s authorial personae and writing techniques. Through the employment of Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of the deterritorialization of language alongside Walter Benjamin’s models of the flâneur and translation, and Claude Lévi-Strauss’s concept of bricolage, this thesis examines the complex forms of postcolonial narrative agency and discursive political resistance in O’Nolan’s work. While O’Nolan is often read in biographical terms or within the frameworks of literary modernism and postmodernism, this thesis aims to demonstrate the politically ambivalent nature of his writing through his creation of liminal authorial selves and heterogeneous narrative forms. As a bi-lingual author, O’Nolan is linguistically ‘in-between’ languages and, because of this, he deterritorializes both historical and literary associations of the Irish and English languages to produce parodic and comic versions of national and linguistic identity. His satiric novel An Béal Bocht exposes, through his use of an array of materials, how Irish folk and peasant culture have been fetishized within colonial and nationalist frameworks. In order to avoid such restricting forms of identity, O’Nolan positions his own authorial self within a multitude of pseudonyms which refuse a clear, assimilable subjectivity and political position. Because of this, O’Nolan’s authorial voice in his journalism is read as an allusive flâneur figure. Equally, O’Nolan deterritorializes Irish mythology in At Swim-Two-Birds as a form of palimpsestic translation and rhizomatic re-mapping of a number of literary traditions which reflect the Irish nation while in The Third Policeman O’Nolan deconstructs notions of empirical subjectivity and academic and scientific epistemological knowledge. This results in an infinite form of fantastical writing which exposes the limited codes of Irish national culture and identity without reterritorializing such identities. Because O’Nolan’s ‘minor’ literary challenge is reflective of the on-going crisis of Ireland’s incomplete decolonization, this thesis employs the concept of ‘minor’ literature to read Ireland’s historical past and contemporary modernity through O’Nolan’s multi-voiced and layered narratives.

My dissertation critiques Western culture’s vertical command of “growing up” to adult completion (rational, heterosexual, married, wealthy, professionally successful) as a reductionist itinerary of human movement leading to subjective sedimentations. Rather, my project proposes ways of “moving rhizomatically” by which it advances a notion of a machinic identity that moves continuously, contingently, and waywardly along less vertical, less excruciating and more horizontal, life-affirmative trails. To this end, my thesis proposes a “rhizomatic semiosis” as extrapolated from the philosophy of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari to put forward a notion of language and, by implication, subjectivity, as dynamic and metamorphic. Rather than trying to figure out who the child is or what it experiences consciously, my project wishes to embrace an elusiveness at the heart of subjectivity to argue for continued identity creation beyond the apparently confining parameters of adulthood. This dissertation, then, is about the need to re-examine our ways of growing beyond the lines of teleological progression. By turning to Deleuze’s child, an intangible one that “makes desperate attempts to carry out a performance that the psychoanalyst totally misconstrues” (A Thousand Plateaus 13), I wish to shift focus away from the hierarchical, binary, and ideal model of “growing up” and toward a notion of movement that makes way for plural identities in their becoming. This endeavour reveals itself in particular in the work of John Wray, Todd Field, Peter Cameron, Sara Prichard, Michael Cunningham, and Cormac McCarthy, whose work has received little or no attention at all—a lacuna in research that exists perhaps due to these artists’ innovative approach to a minor literature that promotes the notion of a machinic self and questions the dominant modes of Western culture’s literature for, around, and of children.

This thesis offers an analysis of women in horror film through an in depth exploration of what I term ‘gynaehorror’ – horror films that are concerned with female sex, sexuality and reproduction. While this is a broad and fruitful area of study, work in it has been shaped by a pronounced emphasis upon psychoanalytic theory, which I argue has limited the field of inquiry. To challenge this, this thesis achieves three things. Firstly, I interrogate a subgenre of horror that has not been studied in depth for twenty years, but that is experiencing renewed interest. Secondly, I analyse aspects of this subgenre outside of the dominant modes of inquiry by placing an emphasis upon philosophies of sex, gender and corporeality, rather than focussing on psychodynamic approaches. Thirdly, I consider not only what these theories may do for the study of horror films, but what spaces of inquiry horror films may open up within these philosophical areas. To do this, I focus on six broad streams: the current limitations and opportunities in the field of horror scholarship, which I augment with a discussion of women’s bodies, houses and spatiality; the relationship between normative heterosexuality and the twin figures of the chaste virgin and the voracious vagina dentata; the representation and expression of female subjectivity in horror films that feature pregnancy and abortion; the manner in which reproductive technology is bound up within hegemonic constructions of gender and power, as is evidenced by the figure of the ‘mad scientist’; the way that discourses of motherhood and maternity in horror films shift over time, but nonetheless result in the demonisation of the mother; and the theoretical and corporeal possibilities opened up through Deleuze and Guattari’s model of schizoanalysis, with specific regard to the 'Alien' films. As such, this thesis makes a unique contribution to the study of women in horror film, while also advocating for an expansion of the theoretical repertoire available to the horror scholar.

My dissertation critiques Western culture’s vertical command of “growing up” to adult completion (rational, heterosexual, married, wealthy, professionally successful) as a reductionist itinerary of human movement leading to subjective sedimentations. Rather, my project proposes ways of “moving rhizomatically” by which it advances a notion of a machinic identity that moves continuously, contingently, and waywardly along less vertical, less excruciating and more horizontal, life-affirmative trails. To this end, my thesis proposes a “rhizomatic semiosis” as extrapolated from the philosophy of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari to put forward a notion of language and, by implication, subjectivity, as dynamic and metamorphic. Rather than trying to figure out who the child is or what it experiences consciously, my project wishes to embrace an elusiveness at the heart of subjectivity to argue for continued identity creation beyond the apparently confining parameters of adulthood. This dissertation, then, is about the need to re-examine our ways of growing beyond the lines of teleological progression. By turning to Deleuze’s child, an intangible one that “makes desperate attempts to carry out a performance that the psychoanalyst totally misconstrues” (A Thousand Plateaus 13), I wish to shift focus away from the hierarchical, binary, and ideal model of “growing up” and toward a notion of movement that makes way for plural identities in their becoming. This endeavour reveals itself in particular in the work of John Wray, Todd Field, Peter Cameron, Sara Prichard, Michael Cunningham, and Cormac McCarthy, whose work has received little or no attention at all—a lacuna in research that exists perhaps due to these artists’ innovative approach to a minor literature that promotes the notion of a machinic self and questions the dominant modes of Western culture’s literature for, around, and of children.

My dissertation critiques Western culture’s vertical command of “growing up” to adult completion (rational, heterosexual, married, wealthy, professionally successful) as a reductionist itinerary of human movement leading to subjective sedimentations. Rather, my project proposes ways of “moving rhizomatically” by which it advances a notion of a machinic identity that moves continuously, contingently, and waywardly along less vertical, less excruciating and more horizontal, life-affirmative trails. To this end, my thesis proposes a “rhizomatic semiosis” as extrapolated from the philosophy of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari to put forward a notion of language and, by implication, subjectivity, as dynamic and metamorphic. Rather than trying to figure out who the child is or what it experiences consciously, my project wishes to embrace an elusiveness at the heart of subjectivity to argue for continued identity creation beyond the apparently confining parameters of adulthood. This dissertation, then, is about the need to re-examine our ways of growing beyond the lines of teleological progression. By turning to Deleuze’s child, an intangible one that “makes desperate attempts to carry out a performance that the psychoanalyst totally misconstrues” (A Thousand Plateaus 13), I wish to shift focus away from the hierarchical, binary, and ideal model of “growing up” and toward a notion of movement that makes way for plural identities in their becoming. This endeavour reveals itself in particular in the work of John Wray, Todd Field, Peter Cameron, Sara Prichard, Michael Cunningham, and Cormac McCarthy, whose work has received little or no attention at all—a lacuna in research that exists perhaps due to these artists’ innovative approach to a minor literature that promotes the notion of a machinic self and questions the dominant modes of Western culture’s literature for, around, and of children.

This thesis explores the creative function of the pseudonym Sara Sand, used by the author Stina Aronson for four literary works in the late 1920s and early 1930s. Två herrar blev nöjda (Two gentlemen were content), Fabeln om Valentin (The tale of Valentin), Tolv hav (Twelve oceans) and Syskonbädd (Siblingbed) are modernist and experimental works that I approach with an experimental way of reading. In order to emphasize what I find to be an inherent strive for freedom within these texts, I draw from Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattaris notion of desire as a productive force and their view of the text as a rhizomatic structure, as presented in Anti-Oedipus (1972) and A Thousand Plateaus (1980). The characters in Sara Sands writing are in constant movement and in continuous processes of becomings which challenges any kind of fixity, whether that be social structures and hegemonic discourses or simply the individual self.